Don't Waste Time- When you'r learning to Code.
When you're learning to code, do you ever feel like you're stuck learning the same thing over and over again? You might read this article and by the end you feel like you kind of get it. But when the next day rolls around you've no clue, how any of it works anymore so you have to go back and re-watch the tutorial but unfortunately this pattern keeps repeating. You might feel like none of this knowledge is actually sticking in your brain and it can get very frustrating to feel like you're not getting anywhere.
So in this articles I'm going to cover some common pitfalls. That might be tripping you up and causing you to waste time when you're learning to code. Now as a disclaimer keep in mind that there are no magical shortcuts that will transform you overnight into a coding expert. I know, even with good learning techniques it's still going to take time to go from a beginner developer to a more advanced one alright let's get into the tips.
Don't Learn Things Randomly
The first one is don't learn things randomly, Figure out a road map to follow. If you're jumping around trying to learn Git one day CSS custom properties the next and java script promises on the third you may be setting yourself up for a lot of hardship.
Instead of picking things at random to learn look for a structured path that you can follow, One path you can use is called learn web development for absolute beginners, It shows you a simplified roadmap of the main skills that you'll need to learn and the order to learn them in you can also go through an online boot camp curriculum like - Free CodeCamp, Zero to Mastery or Ania Kubów's 12 hour bootcamp on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The benefit of following a pre-made path is that you'll know what you need to learn and when and as you go from one step to the next. You'll be able to see your progress and feel like you're actually getting somewhere. Now as you're following your path you might be tempted to try to learn multiple things at the same time, In order to get through everything more quickly but doing this may actually divide your attention and make it harder for that knowledge to stick.
Focus on One Thing at a Time
Tip number two is don't try to learn everything all at once, But focus on learning one thing at a time. I recommend staying on one subject until you feel you have a decent grasp of the basics at least, When you're starting out for example let's say you're learning html first, Once you feel like you know most of the common tags and can build a very basic html web page you can move on to learning CSS then in the future. If you come across an html tag that you're not familiar with you can take some time to learn about that specific tag.
Be an Active Learner, not Passive
Tip number three be an active learner, Don't just passively consume content. Sitting back and watching an instructor go through the material without trying anything yourself is not going to get you very far, Instead try to do some combination of taking a new information and then trying it yourself in real life.
For example I went through Wes Bos's CSS grid course back when I was first learning about grid, What I did was I would watch the video and try to code along with the lessons. If I didn't fully understand something, I would go back and watch it again and after each lesson, I would pause the course and try to build the lesson examples on my own without looking back as much as possible. This trying to create what you've just learned without looking at the source code is a great way to see how much you actually remember. It'll very quickly help you identify the weak points in your knowledge, So you can then go back and fill it in after the course was done. I felt like I had a basic grasp of CSS grid but I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any definition and I think that's okay because I could try to use grid. When building website layouts and if I ever got stuck on anything I could refer back to the course or other resources like Mozilla Developer Network.
learning new skills and coding is a combination of learning the knowledge and putting it into practice.
Don't just memorize Stuff
Tip number four don't just memorize stuff, Remember back in school when you were learning vocabulary words and history dates. You might have studied lists of facts and memorized them so that you could regurgitate them for tests and quizzes. Now I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of rote memorization, However trying to learn html by just memorizing lists of all the html tags is not going to be very effective. Coding is an applicable skill not just a collection of abstract facts, Obviously you do need to be able to remember things in order to use them, But you're going to learn flexbox a lot faster if you explore all the different properties by playing around in a code pen for a day or two as opposed to just memorizing the definition of flex grow. No web developer is going to know everything off the top of their head I can attest to this as someone who worked in the industry for a long time and worked with other professional developers. We all used Google or DuckDuckGo if you care about your privacy to look up stuff constantly, In a way Stack Overflow, MDN, and CSS Tricks become kind of like an extension of your brain, The goal of all this is to be able to build websites and if you need to look up stuff along the way that's perfectly fine everyone does it.
Build Stuff
Tip number five build stuff, I know everyone says this but it really is the best way to learn coding. Watching tutorials and going through courses is the beginning not the end of learning web development. At my first web dev job I would be given a project like building a landing page with a button and getting it to submit to a database. Now since this was my job, I had to build it, I didn't really have a choice and oftentimes I'll be given a task that I had no idea, how to do? Scary right the only solution was to jump right in and try my best, I would look stuff up and try things on my own and ask for help, when I really was stuck. Even though the process of figuring this all out may have been very painful at times, it was all worth it in the end when I got to look at my finished website.
This is one big benefit of learning by building projects. having a tangible goal in front of you is great because when you reach it. You'll feel like you've really achieved something. If you're looking for project ideas don't worry because there are tons of them on the internet search for things like "javascript project ideas" or "react project ideas" you get the picture and personally I always recommend FrontendMentor.io for front-end projects that are also great additions to your portfolio.
Conclusion
If you're currently learning to code, I really hope that this article has been helpful for you let me know down in the comments what you thought and if you have any more tips that you found useful feel free to share those as well so thanks and we'll see you in the next one :)